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Gender, Globalization and Media in the Indian Diaspora

Consuming Bollywood is a major activity in the Indian diaspora and the revenue generated from diasporic audiences is growing exponentially. By combining extended qualitative interviews and textual analysis, this book provides an insightful analysis of how the women who are socially located in the Indian diaspora use the spectacle of Bollywood cinema to renegotiate cultural meanings of home, gender, belonging, and identity. By taking the experiences and interpretations of diasporic women as central, this book substantially adds to the literature on gendered and transnational identity in the context of migration and globalization. Furthermore, it considers the emergence of Bollywood as a potent global brand that is reconstituting cultural identities within a transnational, neoliberal, market-driven economy.

4. National Texts and Transnational Identities

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National Texts and Transnational Identities

The outsider/insider dilemma is exquisitely explored in Jhumpa Lahiri’s well-known novel, Namesake. Lahiri’s vignettes of Ashima, who arrives as a young Indian immigrant wife are replete with dilemmas, contradictions, struggles, triumphs, and setbacks. Ashima’s initial terror of bringing up her child in a land “where she is related to no one, where she knows so little” gives way finally to a reconciliation with her migrant self – unafraid, independent, “a resident everywhere and nowhere.”1 However, Ashima’s story is not necessarily a linear narrative that culminates in assimilation. Instead, at the very moment that she finally emerges comfortable, knowledgeable, and adapted in her new world, she decides to return to her home culture. Her circular route reminds us to think of immigrant identity as complicated, always in process, and interminably incomplete. The return in the final chapter of Ashima’s story emphasizes the seductive power of “home” and “nation” for non-Western, non-white immigrants in a society that typically considers them as perpetual outsiders.

Novelist Amitav Ghosh remarks, “the spaces of India travel with the migrant,” and India too “has no vocabulary for separating the migrant from India.”2 Ghosh’s comments can be demonstrated through examples of NRIs (non-resident Indians) being constantly wooed by the Indian government, multinational corporations, and the media. These include peddling ways in which immigrants can recuperate a sense of homeland through discounted phone rates on festivals, investments in time-share properties in India, diasporic...

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